Social Media – Counter Intuitive Part I

Many things in life are counter intuitive – social media is one of them.

Strategy Development

For every important business task it is wise to build a strategy – social media is no different

Intuitive
– You involve your management team
– You review your current position – make an audit
– Do a survey what customers may be interested in
– Create a plan
– You roll out your social media strategy

Counter Intuitive
– Before you do anything you connect with your customers and have conversations
– You ask them what their strategy is and how you can participate
– You create a customer based strategy team and involve your management
– Your customers create a social media strategy with you
– There is nothing to roll out as it is their work to a large degree

Marketing Engagement

The name “Social MEDIA” indicates it is a marketing thing and since marketing was responsible to “attract the masses”, social media is intuitively a marketing responsibility.

Intuitive
– Traditional marketing is getting less effective so let’s explore social media
– Assume this is a new “channel” and promote products and services through tweets and posts
– Since resources are scares let’s outsource the work and have others do it
– Measure results as increase in traffic and number of followers

Counter Intuitive
– Social media is about conversations and the most prevalent group for customer engagement is sales
– As clients share best practices and are willing to talk – social media is a perfect reference selling place
– Social media practitioner share their thoughts and what is on top of their mind – the perfect scenario for sales people to engage without the selling part
– Customers express their needs and wishes – product managers will find more inputs there than through all market research together
– Marketing has actually no reason to engage at least as long as the marketing responsibility is to create brand awareness or promote anything. Marketing engagement in the social web is considered counter productive by most users.

Community Building

Businesses build online communities to provide a platform for customers to meet, share and compare notes and connect with each other for a variety of reasons.

Intuitive
The roll out plan is taken with great care.
– Add some content so it is not an empty community
– Invite some people you trust and like you so it makes a better impression when you invite maore
– Don’t participate yourself to make it a “customer community – not your platform”
– Over time invite more and more people…

Counter Intuitive
– Do not roll out a community at all – it is not something you throw AT a market – but build WITH a market
– Don’t add any of your own content to “fill it up” but inspire people to provide theirs
– Don’t invite just a few but ALL your connection. You won’t throw a test party and then do a “real” party later on.
– Show a presence and interest in your own community. Chime in when you need to – like when others don’t

Social Media Monitoring

Intuitive
– You monitor the space and expect every discussion to be recorded
– You feed the streams it into your CRM system to know exactly what your clients are saying
– You create an escalation and response system that triggers other functions based on caught data
– You want to have 100% coverage of your market

Counter Intuitive
– You do not monitor the streams at all – as you can’t sit there 24/7 and watch each and every conversation
– You reach out to the individuals you are interested in and check their most recent conversation
– You use Social Media Monitoring for overall sentiment analysis and don’t worry about 100% coverage
– You use Social Media Monitoring to identify new names or new topics for lead generation but not customer analysis